What a great summer we had in England

Over here in England we've had the best summer in some years. During a recent week holiday in Devon, we could as well have been in the French Riviera the temperatures were so high. I stumbled across a town called Lynton in the Exmoor region on the way back, and what scenery there - the valley of rocks is certainly worth a visit!

In the town centre there was a small record shop, I don't know the name, but I managed to get half and hour in there to pick up a few records.

Over the summer, I still managed to build a new set of speakers for the study during this time. After all was said and done, I did not go for the sub-woofer and satellite speaker solution. Instead building a pair of high quality bookshelves. More on this in a dedicated article that's coming soon.

Hot on the heels of a successful speaker build, I moved my vinyl collection up into the study as my hand-built bookshelf speakers outperform my floor standers downstairs. They have real depth, voices just sound real and when driven by my valve phono stage on the right song, they can give me goosebumps.

Actually, my next task is to upgrade my turntable too, I want to improve the rega 301 arm and the platter. Again, more about this in another article.

On the development front, not much has changed: the coders corner still runs on Joomla and I actually prefer it, it's much easier to keep maintained. Work wise I still write Multi-threaded Financial Java systems and still enjoy doing so.

So my two niches continue, High fidelity audio and Software development in Java and long may they! I write this while listening to Bob Dylan and Neil Young on Spotify premium, I think I'll have to buy some of both those on vinyl LP soon. My list of records gets longer.